A review of my RVF400

Published: 23 November 2006

I thought I'd submit my experiences of owning a Honda RVF400 for the last six months, having read a message on the 400greybike forum. It all started last May, having previously owned many big bore race reps (ZXR,RI, etc..) blasting round on a Sunday or doing the odd trackday, I finally decided to take the plunge and go racing.

At the time I owned a Ducati 998 trackbike, I figured, because I hadn't won the lottery that week,the duke might be a bit to costly to maintain and it would probably be a bit of a handful for my first season. I went down the 400 route because a didn't want something that would spit me off at the thought of being a bit hamfisted in the wet, Out of all the 400cc bikes the honda rvf just seemed to stand out as something that would be bulletproof (honda!) for racing. I started looking in bikemart, biker forums, etc.., after a few visits looking at smashed recks held together with tie-wraps I found a well looked after race RVF, the owner(a genuine biker hero) who raced at the IOM for more than 30 years had spared no expence. Blueprinted engine, maxton suspension, ram-air.. all done, If I was going to have a 400, this would be the one! The down side I thought would be the fact that the smallest thing I had ever ridden before was a 750, any 400 no matter how good it was, would still be, well er...Gutless.

The first race meeting I did was at Aintree in Liverpool, in the morning I was a bag of nerves and getting on the track almost made me feel sick, but the one thing that did stand out was how awsome this little 400 felt, okay, sure it wasn't going to pull my arms off but the user friendlyness that comes through the chassis just asking you to push more and more, the sound from the V4 engine doing 14500RPM, even in the wet its not intimadating the refinment of the bike just shines through, it just makes you feel your on somthing very special, and to be honest you are! The NC30 & NC35 are almost exact scaled down replicas of the infamous racer the VFR750 RC30.

If I had known how much fun these bikes are when I was on the road, I'm pretty sure I would of had one of these. The fact of the matter is that to have fun on a big bike, the risk of injury and your licence is alot higher that having fun on a little Honda.

My outlook on these bikes has changed so much that at the moment me and a friend are building a moto gp special out of an RVF, (RCV211v copy front fairing, CBR600rr tail unit & subframe, underseat exhaust) a 400cc V4 RCV212v road bike! I'll keep you posted....